Widely recognized as key partners for achieving international climate goals (1, 2), businesses like to indicate that their targets and activities are “Paris-aligned.” In response, research and initiatives have emerged to guide and assess whether companies’ targets represent an adequate mitigation effort to achieve the Paris Agreement. Here, we highlight conceptual limitations of effort-sharing approaches applied to companies and argue that the fundamental assumption of using emission-reduction targets as the central and often sole metric for setting or benchmarking individual corporations’ climate action ambition is simply insufficient because future innovators are neglected. Although emissions targets can help curb emissions, we detail the risks of relying on individual corporation’s emissions targets to guide and track progress in aligning the economy with the Paris Agreement goals. Last, we clarify the distinct roles of companies as agents of innovation and of market regulators and supervisors as either definers or enforcers of market-wide objectives for sustainability.

中文翻译：

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企业排放目标和对未来创新者的忽视

企业被广泛认为是实现国际气候目标的关键合作伙伴 ( 1 , 2 )，他们喜欢表明其目标和活动“与巴黎保持一致”。为此，出现了研究和倡议来指导和评估公司的目标是否代表了实现《巴黎协定》的充分缓解努力。在这里，我们强调了适用于公司的努力共享方法的概念局限性，并认为使用减排目标作为设定或衡量单个公司气候行动雄心的核心且通常是唯一指标的基本假设是不够的，因为未来的创新者被忽视了。尽管排放目标有助于抑制排放，但我们详细介绍了依靠个别公司的排放目标来指导和跟踪经济与《巴黎协定》目标保持一致的进展的风险。最后，我们阐明了公司作为创新代理人以及市场监管者和监督者作为整个市场可持续发展目标的定义者或执行者的不同角色。